It is a conference about all aspects of information-theoretic security. Its
aim is to bring together researchers from all over the world from the areas
of cryptography, information theory and quantum information. The conference
was created as a successor of the “IEEE Information Theory Workshop on
Theory and Practice in Information-Theoretic Security” on Awaji Island,
Japan, and takes place every 18 month, alternating between Asia, Europe and
North America. Previous ICITS conferences were held in Madrid (Spain),
Calgary (Canada), Shizuoka (Japan) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

As in previous ICITS conferences, the plenary talks were given by the
leading researchers in the field. This year, these talks were given by
Serge Fehr (CWI Amsterdam), Patrick Hayden (McGill University), Negar
Kiyavash (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Xin Li (University
of Washington), Krzysztof Pietrzak (IST Austria) and Salil Vadhan (Harvard
University).

The usual process for conferences in Computer Science is that all submitted
papers first undergo a careful reviewing process, and all papers that are
accepted are not only presented at the conference, but they also appear in
the conference’s proceedings. Previous ICITS conferences also used this
format, but it turned out not to be optimal for information theorists and
physicists. For this years ICITS, the organizers therefore decided to make
a special “workshop track,” in addition to the more standard “conference
track,” where the speakers needed to submit only a one-page abstract which
will appear in the proceedings. This new format with both a conference and
a workshop track was a big success, both in quality and quantity, and
having as additional track also increased the number of participants.

The ICITS
2013 will take place in Singapore, from November 28 to 30, 2013.

Description: Any cryptographic functionality, such as encryption or authentication, must be implemented in the real world before it can be put to practical use. This implementation typically takes the form of either a software implementation for a general-purpose device such as a personal computer, or as a dedicated secure hardware device, whose main purpose is to embody the cryptographic functionality. Examples of such secure hardware devices include smart cards, car alarm key fobs and computerized ballots. To evaluate the security of a cryptographic system, researchers look for flaws which allow an attacker to break the security assumptions of the system (for example, allowing an unauthorized party to view or modify a message intended for someone else). Physical attacks (also called implementation attacks) compromise the system by taking advantage of the physical aspects of the algorithm\'s implementation. Some physical attacks (such as, for example, power analysis) recover the secret key used by the secure device by analyzing physical effects produced during its use; Others (such as, for example, relay attacks) disable or otherwise limit its secure behaviour by exploiting design or implementation flaws or by changing the underlying assumptions made by the designers of the system. \r\n\r\nThis research focuses on physical attacks on secure hardware devices and on countermeasures which protect against these attacks. My goals were to investigate vulnerabilities in current secure hardware implementations and to evaluate the effectiveness of current and proposed countermeasures against these vulnerabilities. The two main tracks of my research are side-channel analysis (and explicitly power analysis) and secure RFID.\r\n\r\nIn the side-channel analysis track, I investigated ways of reducing the data requirements of power analysis attacks. We showed how to mount key recovery attacks on a secure device using an extremely low amount of measurement data. The main novelty of our[...]

Actually, what I was proposing is largely orthogonal to current "two-stage" review systems. My point was to have a system where authors and fellow PC members review the reviewers. Furthermore, this review would cause bad reviewers to lose the right to publish their own work at future top conferences. This would create (I think) a powerful incentive for reviewers to spend the time to craft better reviews -- at the very least, to understand better technically what is going on in a paper that they are supposed to be reviewing. -- Finally, coming back to the points raised in this thread about multi-stage reviews: At TCC 2013 this year, we tried out a system which allowed for *freeform* interaction between PC members and authors (i.e. a "poly-stage" review process). In my opinion as the PC chair with a global view of what happened, this interaction was extremely helpful, especially with papers that were "on the edge", or were misunderstood during the review process. --Amit
From: 2013-29-06 06:34:34 (UTC)

Submission: 21 July 2013Notification: 16 August 2013From September 12 to September 13Location: London (Royal Holloway University of London, Egham), United KingdomMore Information: http://workshop13.tclouds-project.eu/